Design Considerations

The design of a printing job for flexo is similar to that of other processes.

The desired printed image is designed and laid out on the computer using the usual drawing, image editing and page layout tools.

Negative, right-reading negatives are produced either photomechanically or digitally with an imagesetter.

Direct to plate systems for flexo are just now appearing on the market.

One issue flexo, which is not of importance for other printing processes, is compensation and shape distortion.

Printing plate elongation takes place when the plate is curved around the printing cylinder. This causes the print repeat length to increase and all design elements to grow in the circumferential direction.

To compensate for this the image must be “preshrunk” along this direction using page layout or imposition software.

The scale factor can be determined from the relief height and the cylinder radius.